Question: My husband was killed nearly a year ago, and my 11-year-old son is still having a difficult time with it. Before the accident, he was always cheerful and social and hardly ever complained. That still describes him, most of the time, but every now and again he slips into moods where he is just the opposite.

These episodes occur once every couple of weeks and last for a couple of days, on average. I took him to see a therapist a while back, but I saw no change after three months of weekly sessions, so I took him out. When these moods happen, we talk about how special his dad was and how much he misses him, but I don’t think I’m making any headway. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

I’m among those across the baseball universe that still mourns the passing of the great Yogi Berra. I grew up loving Yogi Berra. I’m sure at first it was simply because of his unique name. But as I grew older, I became more aware of the man and what would become such legendary status. In many ways, he was baseball — a heralded player, coach and manager who had the best of both worlds in baseball. I found him truly unique and these days it’s so hard to find someone original. So it was a truly bitter pill to swallow when we lost him in September at the tender age of 90.

It sat there on your parents’ shelf, or maybe your grandparents’, alongside the six volumes of Winston Churchill’s chronicle of World War II and the 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization.” It had two distinctions. One was the menacing swastika on the spine of the book. The other was that it was the only one of those 18 volumes that anyone in your family ever actually opened.

It is William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” and more than a million people read it. It may be, aside from the Bible, the biggest book ever read by a big audience, and that audience devoured it, discussed it and was shaped by it. A generation of Americans formed their view of the horrors of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 from its pages or from elders or teachers who themselves read it.